What Can You Do?

If you want to save the Tumbledown Dick, if you want to stop Farnborough’s historic pub from becoming yet another McDonald’s restaurant, then there are a number of things that you can do:

Sign the petition objecting to Farnborough’s Tumbledown being sold to and converted into a McDonald’s fast food outlet. You can see the petition Save our heritage & say ‘NO’ to McDonald’s at bit.ly/SaveTumbly

Feel free to share the link with your friends, on twitter, on your blog etc.

Write to any one of your District Councillors, your County Councillors and, if you write to only one person, write to your MP, objecting to the sale, conversion and/or destruction of the Tumbledown Dick. Write it in your own words, politely expressing whatever practical and objective reasons you have to keeping the Tumbly and restoring it as a pub, music venue and vital community asset www.writetothem.com

Have you signed the petition? We could really do with breaking the 5,000 signature mark to show the strength of feeling over the Tumble Down. If you could ask anybody you know with an interest in Farnborough and the old pub to sign it too, that would be brilliant. Thank you

To encourage people to shop with tax dodging Amazon would quite rightly lead to accusations of hypocrisy if at the same time wanting to help local businesses and retain money within the local economy. Rushmoor does an excellent job destroying local businesses without others doing the same.

One way to make money is to release some music. Do this through bandcamp. Could have a compilation, but I do not recommend as tend to be dire. I suggest EPs. The emphasis should be on good music, quality recordings. Something that will sell in its own right, but with album notes include information on The Tumbledown Dick with links for more information. Can also do this on the bandcamp page. If an EP sells well, it will get into the bandcamp Top 10 and more people will see. Whilst you have a gathering of musicians tonight, at the fund raising gig a good time to see how well received. Have a low minimum price, with pay what you think it is worth. Or even free, with pay what you think it is worth. Bandcamp has lots of advantages: free, easy to listen, share, download. Anything sold bandcamp only takes a small cut. 200 free downloads a month (more free downloads if you sell stuff).

I understand your point about not encouraging consumerism, Keith, but if somebody needs or wants to buy something they’re going to buy it. That is why I carefully chose my words to say that *if* people are looking to do some Xmas shopping on Amazon then it may help us in a little way.

As for the choice of Amazon, it’s a fair point to highlight the fact that they have avoided paying UK tax and it was certainly on my mind when I was setting up the Amazon affiliate account. It is easy to set up and use, and I’ve been familiar with its workings for the best part of a decade, hence my choice of picking it to earn pennies rather than nothing at all. The use of Amazon or any other scheme is always up for reconsideration, as I and the group wish to do business ethically as far as is possible.

For the record, I personally run a local small business, work for local small businesses and have been passionately promoting the SME agenda for over a decade as my full time role. It needs to be understood that we cannot operate completely without certain big businesses and, as an example, if you’re using BT as your internet provider then just remember they were an official Olympic Partner and probably paid no tax on their Olympic earnings.

As for your suggestions of alternative sources of income, that’s brilliant Keith, thank you for pointing those out. We were talking about releasing music last night as an earner for the campaign so we’ll definitely have a look at Bandcamp to see what we can do with it.

I was thinking of bandcamp as a tool for raising money for the campaign, but also please mention to all those performing tonight. It is where they should be putting their music as they will not get ripped off. As of last month, over $30 million straight into the pocket of grass roots musicians.

If you are releasing music, then use bandcamp, do not waste the effort reinventing an inferior wheel. Do not use iTunes or Amazon where you get ripped off, or spotify which uses the facebook model of violation of personal privacy.

Bandcamp lets you upload as high res FLAC. Fans can listen to an entire album on-line. Downloads are high quality mp3 320 (if mp3 can be described as high quality) but also FLAC. Unlike Amazon and iTunes, a few seconds sample of lofi mp3.

You also get lots of useful statistics.

A good example of use of bandcamp is bass player Steve Lawson (who I see has a new album out).

That’s all good stuff, Keith, cheers. If you do know of any alternative affiliate schemes that offer the range of goods that can be had on Amazon then do let us know. hive is good for books & DVDs but doesn’t seem to have an affiliate scheme, unfortunately.